People kept asking me if I was excited or nervous. I never really was. I suppose the closest I came to getting nervous was when I realized that it was an hour to go to the ceremony and I had done everyone’s hair but my own. Luckily veils cover it all up when you just kinda toss your hair in a bun and run out the door without lipstick on.

The event was not without its moment of crisis. The ever-lovely Darien was leading the bridesmaids and myself to the yacht, playing “Wild Rover” on her fiddle (an apropos number, I think, for a bride to march in to). She was almost all the way down the gangplank when her ultra-mega-high-heeled shoe snapped in half. Without missing a beat, she shuffled backwards onto the boat where the crew were waiting with a roll of duct tape. They put her shoe back together lickety-split, proof yet again that there is no sticky situation that cannot be fixed with duct tape.

Each of our dads offered some words of wisdom, and both inadvertently picked Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 to read without knowing that the other had also chosen this text. Great minds do indeed think alike.

And then the surprise. My husband-to-be knew that there would be a musical number, but I had left him in the dark as to what it was. The song “Believe Me if All Those Endearing Young Charms” has always been one of my favorites, not only because it’s incredibly sweet but because it’s so damn Irish. Irish people can’t write anything without mentioning death, drink, or imprisonment, and really, what brings all three of those things together quite as well as marriage? So even poet extraordinaire Thomas Moore, crafting lyrics of undying devotion, had to write something that essentially says “even when you’re all wrinkled and ugly I’ll still want you.” I took Mr. T’s hands and started singing. He got this deer in the headlights look, but then those baby blues went all misty. Then I started getting a little verklempt and it suddenly occurred to me that singing may not have been the best idea. But I kept it together, made it through, and moments later we’d firmly clamped a ball and chain on each of us.

The rest of the cruise was lovely and now we’ve got more photos than we know what to do with from our amazingly talented and camera-obsessed friends. We had so much fun that we had to keep the party going. We’d had enough of yachts, so we retired to more informal digs at Triple Rock Brewery in Berkeley and abandoned filet mignon with demi glacé and champagne in favor of more plebeian cuisine like chili cheese fries and pale ale. I also needed to slip into something more comfortable.

photo courtesy philikon

What a lovely start to a lovely life. Marriage never looked so good.

This is geektastic. My favorite is the Galactic Rebellion for Dummies book. Such a nice touch. On the surface, this is a great piece of theatrical silliness. But the venue chosen for the re-enactment created something a bit more meaningful for me. Look at the faces on the passengers at the beginning of the video. Then watch as they light up as the scene progresses and everyone sees what’s going on. There’s something deeper going on here.

The New York Subway doesn’t have a reputation for being populated by happy people. New York in general is thought of as an aggressive, angry city where people need to have warthog thick skin just to make it from home to work. Then mix in a dense population and congested travel lines. Thanks to religious extremists and the vogons who run the government, mass transit is about as fun as a rectal examination. No liquids. Take your shoes off. Say goodbye to your underwear. If you’re not going by private jet, you’ve got to deal with rude people, smelly people, crazy people, violent people and screaming babies. Sitting in a packed subway car is nobody’s idea of fun, especially with the added tension of constant threats of terrorism. Tension and fear is ever present in the eerie way people move around an airport terminal or a subway platform. Everyone is deliberate in their actions. They are deliberately quiet, deliberately still, and deliberately trying not to do anything that would attract the attention of the cops.

That mood is utterly banished in this video. People laugh. People smile. People forget how awful it is to get from point A to point B and they enjoy themselves for five minutes. The complicated web of religion, politics, fear, and public policy vaporizes and all of a sudden it’s just a few dozen people enjoying themselves. And if that’s not the pursuit of happiness, I don’t know what is. So hats off to you, you pack of guerrilla theater nerds, for bringing a little fun to a public space that is ordinarily devoid of joy. If people can laugh on the New York Subway, they can laugh anywhere.

When I’m done laughing, I’m going to need to develop a coping mechanism for the depression over never finding anything else this awesome.

There’s a lot of people out there doing mashups, but very few are able to effect the kind of poetry that DJ Earworm does. If you take a look at the lyrics from this year’s compilation of the top 25 hits, you can see how he’s lifted the common threads out of popular music and distilled what was on the collective mind. The word “down” appears over and over, but at the same time threads of hope come through.

We all believed that the internet and digital media presented some pretty powerful possibilities, but they weren’t really made tangible for me until I discovered DJ Earworm’s work. It takes a true artist to find the common threads in unrelated things and infuse them both with new meaning. And a really, really kickass beat to dance to. Well done, Mr. DJ. Keep it coming.

But I did it!!!

It ain’t pretty. It don’t make a lot of sense. But dammit, I DID IT. Right now I hate this manuscript too much to do anything with it, but after I finish Star and Scribe I’ll come back to it.

For now, it’s time to play some celebratory Rock Band.

WAHOO!